[Street social education: historical, political and pedagogical bases].

This work is about street social education as a pedagogical system that started in Latin America in the late 1970s, as the street population formed mostly by children and adolescents called for attention. The first street social educators were 'pastoral' agents working at the praça da Sé a place with large numbers of street children in São Paulo. Based on the Liberation Theology and on the pedagogies developed by Paulo Freire, Celestine Freinet, Anton Makarenko, and Emília Ferreiro, the street educators developed a conceptual field and participated in the promulgation of the 1988 Federal Constitution, particularly by writing and introducing the 'Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente' (the 'Child and Adolescent Statute'). Street social education is currently latent and suffering the consequences of program discontinuity caused by successive changes of government. It is, therefore important to know the conceptual proposals.